3/06/2009 @ 1:00PM

Life's Calling

Melissa Kwee could have been the Paris Hilton of Singapore. Her father, Kwee Liong Tek, is, after all, a hotel and property tycoon. But she took a path far from all that glamour and glitz. Recently she spent three days in Shandong, an eastern coastal province in China, interviewing 80 migrant workers for 11 jobs at a resort hotel her family’s company just built in Singapore. It’s not a task the boss’ daughter usually takes on, but Kwee relishes it. Directly recruiting workers cuts down on the huge middlemen fees that migrant workers usually must pay. Sometimes they gobble up to ten months of wages for a two-year contract, she says.

The 37-year-old Kwee has other causes–improving the lot of women, making the public more aware of HIV–but her focus these days is helping migrant workers, from the moment they’re recruited in countries such as India and China to the end of their contracts in Singapore. The oldest of four children, she’s the public face of the Kwee family’s quiet but quite sizable philanthropic efforts. Her father and other family members fund publicly commissioned art works, donate works to Singapore museums and contribute to scholarship and school funds in Singapore and the U.S. He’s the chairman of family-owned Pontiac Land, which owns five-star hotels such as the Ritz-Carlton, the Regent and the Conrad Centennial in Singapore, as well as two office towers near the Marina Bay area.

Unlike many wealthy Asian families, the Kwees don’t have a foundation; instead they donate directly to causes. Melissa Kwee says the economic turmoil “hasn’t affected the contributions significantly” because the company is “quite solid and conservative.”

Migrant workers everywhere have long had to cough up exorbitant fees to find work abroad. To reach Singapore many take out loans or sell their businesses or land back home to pay for middlemen and other expenses. If they get sick or injured, or if their contractor goes out of business, there’s little chance they can recoup those fees, says Kwee. “Foreign workers are a very vulnerable group. I wanted to understand how that vulnerability was being minimized, ignored, addressed or reinforced in our establishments and what we could do about it.”

That’s led to her novel recruitment program. She quickly won the support of her family’s business and its partner, the West Paces Hotel Group, to test a different way of hiring migrant workers for the $260 million Capella Resort they’ve built on Sentosa Island. The partners linked up in 2006 and plan to have up to 30 resorts and hotels around the world by the end of 2011. The Singapore resort, which will open this month, is the first.

Kwee says many migrant workers pay middlemen up to $6,500, or eight to ten months of their salaries, for a two-year contract to work in Singapore. “Hotels end up being presented with workers who can pay [but are] not necessarily the best candidates,” she adds. Her pilot program will shave up to 50% off of these fees.

Some 30% of Singapore’s 3 million-strong workforce are low-skilled foreign workers. Many are domestic helpers, but the service and construction sectors are especially reliant on foreigners. Most come from China, India, Bangladesh and the Philippines. “On one hand, I’m morally incensed by what’s happening; on the other hand I recognize that a measured and logical approach is needed,” Kwee says.

So she went to work in 2007 to educate herself. “I spent time in the hotels, working alongside room attendants and other heart-of-household employees,” she says. “I wanted to hear their stories and listen to their lives. They had all come seeking new opportunities. They reminded me of my forefathers who left their homelands in search of a better life. Along with another researcher, I surveyed more than 200 workers in seven four- and five-star hotels. We are working to develop policies, standard contracts and ethical guidelines for the sector.”

She says that in the past two years her family has begun to “celebrate important festivals with our construction workers on the Capella site. We’ve celebrated with a good meal, a useful present, a popular performance or a ritual like lighting the candles at Deepavali [a Hindu festival of lights].”

It was Kwee’s maternal grandfather, George Aratani, who fired up her passion for social activism. In fact, she adopted his last name as her middle name. Aratani is a second-generation Japanese-American businessman and philanthropist who founded Kenwood Electronics and the Mikasa chinaware company after he and his family were released from internment camps in the U.S. after World War II. Kwee’s father and her mother, who is also Japanese-American, met while they were in college in the U.S.

Kwee, who is single, graduated from Harvard University with a degree in anthropology and won a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research on the dynamics of community leadership within an ethnic group in western Nepal. In 1996 she started Project Access to promote leadership education for Singapore girls. While her two sisters and her brother have gone on to work for the family business full-time, she continued to promote and volunteer for various causes. She served as president of the Singapore National Committee of the U.N. Development Fund for Women, or Unifem, from 2002 to 2006. She initiated campaigns against the commercial sexual exploitation of women and children and helped start a program to teach migrant women workers the basics of personal finance.

Kwee has done enough community and outreach work to know that social change never happens overnight. “I don’t want to fool myself or anyone else that with this [migrant worker] pilot project everything will be okay. This is a long-term commitment that starts with one hotel and will hopefully extend to other hotels, and hopefully will extend more broadly to the service industry.” She’d like to help other service companies develop their own model recruitment practices. Still, she’s mindful that just the “existence [of the program] is success,” she says. “It eliminates the excuse that nothing can be done because there is no alternative.”